Eunice Santos was invited to speak about graph analytics at “Data Science Tools and Methods,” a two-day workshop sponsored by the National Data Service and Midwest Big Data Hub July 11–12 in Rosemont, Illinois. Santos is the Ron Hochsprung Endowed Chair, chair of the computer science department, and professor of computer science. She will discuss her work in large-scale social network analysis and how to embed socio-cultural information in such networks.

The NDS-MBDH workshop is for people from the cyber-infrastructure community and a range of domain scientists interested in learning more about computational methods and data services.

Goals of the workshop are to:

• Identify cross-disciplinary data science tools and methods, as well as the application of data management and analytics tools, to address research challenges
• Expand knowledge and access to data tools, methods, and services
• Seed/foster cross-disciplinary collaborations around cyber-infrastructure research and development and domain applications
• Demos will focus on the use of tools

NDS is a consortium of projects, such as Blue Waters and the Dark Energy Survey; university libraries, including Cornell, Purdue, University of Chicago, and others; cyberinfrastructure centers and projects; and publishers. It envisions a U.S. national infrastructure for data-driven research that includes distributed storage, robust production services, and a well-defined framework for hooking resources into the NDS ecosystem.

MBDH is a regional network of partners created to address increasing challenges in collecting, managing, serving, mining, and analyzing rapidly growing and increasingly complex data and information collections to create actionable knowledge and guide decision-making. Its leadership group includes people from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, Indiana University, University of North Dakota, and Iowa State University.